Watching flares like this assists the IRIS mission to learn how solar material and energy move all over the Sun’s lower atmosphere, so we can better determine what pushes the constant variations we observe.
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Jaw-dropping images from NASA.
Time and again, the USA space agency has released videos and images of the sun spewing solar material and oozing plasma on its surface, which makes one wonder what other secrets the enormous ball of fire may be holding. In turn, the energy will heat the Sun’s atmosphere that releases the visual particles into space that can be captured and observed from the Earth using NASA’s instruments. Solar flares are powerful explosions of radiation.
NASA explains a solar flare can cause material to cascade down in big loops – called coronal rain.
Lina Tran from the US Space Agency, NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre said “This material is plasma, a gas in which positively and negatively charged particles have separated, forming a super-hot mix that follows paths guided by complex magnetic forces in the sun’s atmosphere”. Much like the water vapor that forms clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, the superhot plasma loops in the sun’s outer atmosphere – called the corona – cool, condense and fall back down to the sun’s surface.
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A stunning video of plasma rain on the surface of the sun shared by NASA is sure to take your breath away. Bright pixels that show up at the conclusion of the video aren’t brought on by the solar flare, but happen when high-energy particles saturate IRIS’s charge-coupled device camera – a device used to find photons.
